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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28135137">The Density of Us</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker'>lonelywalker</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Back to the Future (Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 14:55:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,547</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28135137</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Tell her destiny brought you together. Tell her that she’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in the world...”</em>
</p><p>Hill Valley didn’t get hurricanes. Hill Valley did, however, have Lorraine Baines.</p><p>Hurricanes, George thought, were easier to handle.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>George McFly/Lorraine Baines McFly</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Density of Us</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/gifts">Heather</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>1. George</b>
</p><p>George was 17 years old the time he didn’t die.</p><p>On reflection, not dying should have been no surprise at all. He had spent all of his life not dying by that point. Since 1938 he had been alive every single day, without even accumulating any of those near-misses like Ralph Majors from across the street, who regularly showed off his appendix scar like some hard-won war wound.</p><p>But one day in 1955, it was like his whole life… <em>didn’t</em> flash before his eyes? No, that wasn’t it. As he stumbled away from the road, grit on the knees of his pants and white-knuckling his bike handlebars, it was the opposite, a different opposite. Like a whole life was being sucked out of his soul, draining him of a future, of fate, of destiny.</p><p>Or, more likely, that was just what happened when you were trotting away in sheer terror from any of Mr. Baines’ questions about what exactly you’d been doing with binoculars in a tree outside his daughter’s window.</p><p>That made more sense. After all, if there was one thing Hill Valley was short on, it was destiny.</p><p>(There were in fact several things Hill Valley was short on; George ran through an itemized list in his mind every time he needed to calm himself down with a dose of existential angst.)</p><p>A while back, <em>Time</em> magazine had designated his age group “The Silent Generation” and, while that seemed like a premature eulogy in 1951, a 13-year-old George McFly had accepted that it was just giving a name to a truth he already knew: his was a life without destiny or dreams. Wars and heroism had been ended forever before he could do a single push-up. The greatest scientific breakthrough had been made while he struggled with multiplication. </p><p>“What am I supposed to do?” he’d whined plaintively to his parents in a moment when any sign from God, ranging from a dazzling beam of light to an aneurysm, would have been welcomed. They had shrugged in an impressive kind of unison they never managed in any other activity.</p><p>Adrift without a guiding star in the form of sports or religion, without any kind of superlative academic excellence that made teachers take note, George might have faded away forever into irrelevance, a nothing boy in a nothing town, until he became tethered to a beacon. A beacon that defined his every waking moment. A beacon named-</p><p>“Hey, I’m talking to you, McFly!”</p><p>George was the kind of kid people called “tall” when they thought “lanky” and mostly meant “awkward,” but at any height he would have shrunk away from Biff Tannen. Biff’s parents weren’t around, although George could imagine he’d been birthed from some unholy union between an oak tree and a locomotive, and from the moment their paths had crossed, George had triggered some kind of predator instinct deep in Biff’s reptilian brain.</p><p>So he did Biff’s homework and called it good exam preparation, and built a fort of stories around himself: <em>Amazing Stories</em>, <em>Wonder Stories</em>, <em>Fantastic Story Quarterly</em>... Even the Revell Boeing B-29 kit he’d been given for Christmas, which his dad viewed as an appropriate pastime for a young man, and which George viewed as an appropriate vessel for interplanetary travel, given a few modifications and a more exciting paint job.</p><p>He returned to that fort after falling from the tree, after not dying, and took stock of the situation like the heroes of his stories might do: binoculars intact, clothes scuffed but nothing too bad…</p><p>George stood in his room, in an empty house (Mom was with her sister again, Dad was wherever), and felt truly lost. He was supposed to be somewhere else. Which wasn’t true at all. He was supposed to be doing his homework. Biff’s homework. Instead it felt like… like a hurricane had barreled through his life right at the moment he’d been about to set down the very last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.</p><p>Hill Valley didn’t get hurricanes. (There had been a tropical storm when he was a baby, and people still measured every single rain-cloud according to that yardstick.)</p><p>Hill Valley did, however, have Lorraine Baines.</p><p>Hurricanes, George thought, were easier to handle. You knew where you were with a hurricane. Everyone would tell you what to do, what to expect, how to stock up on food and board up the windows and survive. You were all in it together.</p><p>Girls - women - were half the population, but it was simpler to learn about Martians. Which was part of the reason he’d ended up in Biff’s gravitational pull to begin with. Guys like Biff <em>knew</em> things. Some of the things were probably exaggerations or flat-out lies, but at least Biff made it sound like less of an incomprehensible, possibly terminal condition. You went along in life, going to school, impressing no one in Little League, and then suddenly… </p><p>Suddenly you had to figure out your own hairstyle and pick out your own clothes and before you knew it, you were perched in a tree watching a girl take off her clothes. Which was wrong. Of course it was wrong. But it felt a little less wrong than the absolute agony of not understanding himself.</p><p>George sat down at his desk and tried to remember anything, anything at all, about trigonometry and the Revolutionary War. It was going to be a long night.</p><p>***</p><p>The next day… The next day happened. And the next night, too.</p><p>***</p><p>When George woke up for the fifth or sixth time, his ears had finally stopped ringing. His alarm clock, chastened by a panicked hand slamming it to the floor, had long ago given up trying to remind him to go to school. It was afternoon. Probably. What day was it? George’s body was more interested in trying to evacuate every fluid from whatever orifices might be available.</p><p>The bathroom was somewhere he could reason with himself. It felt cooler, calmer in there, and there was a door that locked. </p><p>Had he been drunk? Was he <em>still</em> drunk? He didn’t remember drinking but people always talked about getting blackout drunk and seeing things… He huffed a breath into his cupped hands and sniffed for the sharp bite of alcohol while trying to interrogate the George of yesterday.</p><p>Then - if he hadn’t slept for a week, or a year - he’d gone to school as usual and that new kid had been there, Calvin. The kid who had been outside Lorraine’s house, who had shoved George aside. Maybe he was her cousin or something? But he’d been in the cafe before that, staring and staring like he was some kind of simpleton, or like George was a ghost.</p><p>(George eyed himself in the mirror. He was probably not a ghost.)</p><p>Calvin had dragged him over to meet Lorraine, which sounded like a setup for a cruel joke, but her rejection hadn’t been cruel so much as acting like he didn’t exist at all.</p><p>(George pinched himself. Ow.)</p><p>Why was Calvin so adamant that George ask Lorraine to the dance? Any way George framed it in his head, it could only be designed to make George look like a fool. What guy cared about another guy’s lovelife, except to rib him for it and ask for all the crude details? But assholes like that, like Biff Tannen, would never put as much time and energy and sheer earnestness into it as Calvin had. There was more payoff to tacking a “KICK ME” sign to a guy’s back.</p><p>Maybe… maybe it wasn’t about George at all. Maybe it was about Calvin <em>not</em> wanting to take Lorraine to the dance - second cousins? - and trying to line up George, the only guy he knew in town who wasn’t a complete Neanderthal, to act as some kind of human shield. Because Calvin was sweet on some other girl. Some other girl less related to him.</p><p>George breathed out. That all… That all made sense, right?</p><p>The fear surged through him again before the thought finished crossing his brain. </p><p>Darth Vader. Planet Vulcan. Melted brains. Jesus Christ.</p><p>Had it been real? He’d given himself a lot of bizarre dreams over the years. But none as visceral as what had happened last night. Someone had <em>been</em> there, in his room, inside his <em>head</em>.</p><p>(George checked his ears for signs of brain dribble.)</p><p>He was still trying to convince himself both ways while he got dressed, his hands feeling like they’d been sutured on from some other body. Option one: he’d dreamed or imagined the whole thing, nothing bad would happen, and he should just lay off the <em>Science Fiction Theater</em> for a few weeks. Option two: it had been real, all-powerful aliens cared deeply about his destiny, and he really would die as a virginal 17-year-old. Dammit! Calvin really should have let that car hit him. Becoming a traffic statistic was probably better than brain melting.</p><p>George was not someone who anyone would call brave. His namesakes might have vanquished dragons and founded America. He was blinking blankly at the challenge of tying his own shoelaces. But he would do it. He would bite the bullet and say the words and save his brain from liquefaction.</p><p>He would ask Lorraine Baines to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Or die trying. And he had spent all of his life not dying by that point. The odds were, for once, in his favor.</p><p> </p><p>
  <b>2. Lorraine</b>
</p><p>Lorraine was 17 years old the first time anything in her life made sense.</p><p>On reflection, this was possibly the most demonstrably wrong thought she had ever let pass through her brain. Her life up to this moment, or at least up to the last few days, had almost <em>aggressively</em> made sense, with every element falling into place just as everyone expected it would. </p><p>Despite Hill Valley sounding like some paradoxical vortex of peculiarity, she knew it was anything but. What Hill Valley was, was some kind of magnetic pole for destiny, unfathomable and inescapable. Everyone traveled along paths fixed as resolutely as the train tracks that ran through the town, cheerfully bound for a fate that was worse than disaster: banality. </p><p>Lorraine had seen her own path for a very long time, seen it in the lives of her parents, even in shadows lurking behind her junior siblings. She’d seen it in the history books too, in old parish records and yellowing newspapers that had made dull school projects into some kind of eerie looking glass. Her great-great grandmother had lived a life more or less like her mother, and more or less like the one she was headed to inhabit. Not a life that horrified and dismayed her: sure, she would like her own children, and of course she would like a husband… </p><p>Well, actually that was the problem right there. She didn’t want “a husband” at all. “A husband” conjured up thoughts of her dad and all his friends, and, worse, of Biff Tannen, who was tall and confident and would probably make something of himself one of these days.</p><p>She shivered, smoothing out the skirt of her dress as though she could sweep away any lingering memory of Biff’s hands on her just hours ago.</p><p>“Do you play tennis?” she said suddenly. It was only sudden because she was parked in a car with a cute boy who seemed to embody the concept of “flustered.”</p><p>The cute boy blinked at her. The tip of his tongue prodded his top lip like he was trying to demonstrate “tongue-tied” in Charades. “Um, tennis? Tennis, like the…” He flapped his hand in the air and half-smiled, like he’d cottoned onto a clever joke. “You’re playing with me.”</p><p>“Well I’d like to. How’s your serve?”</p><p>The half-smile resolved into a full-frown. “Uh… You mean real te- I don’t have… I don’t have a racket.”</p><p>“Oh that’s no problem. Freddie Finmore broke his ankle last week. All his gear’s in his locker and I know the code.”</p><p>George swallowed and his lips moved. He’d asked her if Marty Klein was some relative of hers, but if anything it was the two boys who resembled each other, with the same crystal-clear blue eyes, the same anxiety around her. “People always say girls get into trouble when they’re in cars with boys,” he said finally, with a sort of chuckle. “I… I wasn’t expecting this kind of trouble.”</p><p>“Next week we take Fort Knox,” she said in her best <em>Dragnet</em> deadpan. “Now come on, show me.”</p><p>“Sh-show you?” George was trying to follow her gaze and wound up staring at his lap like some neutered Roy Rogers doll.</p><p>She reached and took his hand in hers, those long, delicate fingers, the grazes on his knuckles that were probably purpling over in the dark. “You promised you’d let me see,” she said, pressing her lips to his wounded hand like she was an Ava Gardner or Lauren Bacall. And she let him stew for a moment longer before the laugh simply couldn’t be held back. “Your <em>face</em>! I mean your story, George. You said you’d let me read it.”</p><p>“Oh.” Was this what girls looked like when boys wanted to see other things in cars? Lorraine liked the way it settled on George. She liked the way she stunned him - not <em>shocked</em> the way she had Marty, once or twice (poor Marty, so innocent), but stunned, like George simply couldn’t take his eyes off her. “Well, Lorraine, I… Maybe we need to get to know each other better?”</p><p>“Or you could take off your pants.”</p><p>George’s gasp was almost straight out of a bawdy sitcom. “Lorraine!”</p><p>Never before had she so clearly seen two ways a night could go, and been so very happy to take either route. “I’m just saying… Show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” George had floored two guys tonight, but she was pretty sure she could blow him down with a feather.</p><p>“You… you write too?”</p><p>Lorraine shrugged with her eyebrows. “I do lots of things.”</p><p>She’d read science fiction before. Well… She’d held the books in her hands and turned the pages, hoping for some big screen spectacle and romance. What she’d got was mostly boring men explaining fake science to other boring men. George’s stories didn’t exactly inspire much hope, but she’d done more for cute boys than squint at almost-illegible handwriting on some kind of reporter’s notebook by flashlight.</p><p>“Dig my beautiful density… What is this, your Spanish vocab test?”</p><p>“Oh, um.” George flipped over a few pages. “There. But I told you it’s just… It’s fragments. Not finished. Not even started, really.”</p><p>She read the few lines that were there, cleared her throat, and declaimed like Vivien Leigh had been told to shoot for something a touch more dramatic: “The universe is wild and infinite, and its chaotic nature makes it both profoundly unpredictable and as easy to understand as the ABCs. For in a world where anything can happen, everything must. And even in a universe so immense that no one could ever perceive its whole, two ordinary people can still mean the world - not just to each other, but to the fate of an entire galaxy.”</p><p>There was a pause as she waited for rapturous applause, or at least a “huh,” before it occurred to her that George was the one waiting for reviews and plaudits. “So tell me about these two ordinary people,” she said.</p><p>“Well, uh… One’s this beautiful ordinary girl… I mean not <em>ordinary</em> but she thinks she is, she thinks she’s just going to be stuck in a regular life in a regular town, getting married to some regular guy who deals cars or something… And then there’s this guy, he’s kind of the same, but from another planet.”</p><p>“He’s an alien?” </p><p>“Yeah, but he’s still… I mean, he looks human, but he has a tough time fitting in with human culture. He has to, though, because this other alien - this mysterious mystical guy - tells him that their love is the only thing that can save the world from, um, melting… Something to do with melting.”</p><p>Lorraine looked at him, at his hair falling into his eyes, at his sharp jaw, at his lips. “Hm,” she said. “Tell me more.”</p><p>And she switched off the flashlight.</p><p>***</p><p>The next day… The next day happened. And the next couple of decades too.</p><p>***</p><p>Gradually, over the years, things fell into place. Not in the way she had once expected and dreaded, but in a way where everything became simpler and clearer. Instead of the dull life of a prisoner who could anticipate every single day because they were all alike, it was the thrill of hitting an unassailable cross-court return because you’d known exactly where the ball would drop.</p><p>In other words, she and George had played a lot of tennis since that night at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. And a lot of “tennis” as well. Probably once you were married with three children you were supposed to stop sneaking off with carefully-spun lies about how you were absolutely, totally playing doubles with Grace and Jonathan, and how it would take all afternoon because Grace had the coordination of a baby gazelle and Jonathan loved to squabble about foot faults like they were in the final of the US Open.</p><p>But oh how Lorraine loved those two athletic dopes - such loyal friends despite being entirely imaginary - and loved more the hours stolen away with George. In a hotel room these days rather than in a creaky old jalopy begged from his dad or a locker room stall, but hours all the same. The kids might be almost all grown up now, with their youngest having big plans for the weekend that echoed some of her own teenage years, but just because they could feed themselves didn’t make them any more respectful of others’ privacy as they instinctively barged through any closed door.</p><p>And there was the other thing.</p><p>“Phil said the book should come today. Publisher’s sending over a courier.”</p><p>The book. That thing that had been gestating since the night they first kissed but had taken many, many years and drafts to finally achieve its final form, through college classes and jobs and raising Dave and Linda and… and Marty.</p><p>In many ways George’s story was their story, and in most ways their story was about Marty - about a mysterious, charming boy they’d known for a few days long ago, who had appeared and disappeared like some shared hallucination. George had finally told her about the alien in his bedroom, which sounded pretty much like any kid’s nightmare until years passed and “Planet Vulcan” and “Darth Vader” became far more than a childish fever dream. Not to mention the squeak she’d let out the first time she saw a Calvin Klein underwear ad in the paper.</p><p>Naming their third child Martin seemed both risky and inevitable. She <em>did</em> like the name, and George had muttered something about if it happened, it had already happened, so they might as well make sure it kept happening. As a child, Marty had seemed no more bizarre or alien than Dave had. He took after his father, that was all. Until, as he grew up and became less of a cute baby boy and more himself, he also became, undeniably, someone Lorraine had already met, decades before. And then there was the living room rug incident.</p><p>“Are you going to let him read it?” She was wrapped up in George’s arms, in expensive sheets that still smelled like floral detergent. </p><p>“Pretty sure none of them want to read their old man’s space romance novel.”</p><p>“You know what I mean… We have to ask him, George. It has to happen now, or soon… Maybe it’s already happened. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten what Marty Klein looked like, and then Marty, our Marty, will turn round, and… I kissed our son and I don’t even remember if it was with tongues.”</p><p>George made a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh. “I know all parents traumatize their kids, but maybe let’s not ask him about that one, huh?” His fingers were trailing through her hair, soothing, like they could fall asleep right here.</p><p>“None of it makes sense,” she said. “I know what you’re always saying, that in science nothing makes sense until it does, but even with traveling through time… Why us? Why not killing Hitler or meeting Jesus? You don’t really believe the fate of the universe depends on us being together, do you? No one in their right mind is going to suddenly appear and whisk off two middle-aged people to fight with laser swords in some intergalactic war.”</p><p>“Probably not,” George said. “But I kind of like the <em>possibility</em> that they might, don’t you?”</p><p>Lorraine arched her back, stretching with a groan. “Then I wish they’d given us some notice. We should probably have played more actual tennis.”</p><p>“Oh I think our stamina’s pretty good.”</p><p>Her elbow found his ribs and then, a moment later, her lips crushed against his. “I dig your beautiful density,” she murmured into his mouth.</p><p>Destiny could wait another half hour.</p>
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